The Goods Revisited

by Peter Saint-Andre

2006-02-22

I've been saying some stupid things lately. Case in point: the recent post in which I said that Islamic counties don't produce anything but oil. Not true. Some research on the world's majority Muslim countries yields the following estimated GDP and non-oil exports for each country:

Thus the total productive output of the Islamic countries is approximately $4.7 trillion with non-oil exports of approximately $390 billion. That's not nothing, but let's keep in mind that there are reportedly 1.4 billion people living in the majority Muslim countries. So the average output per capita in these countries is about $3400 per person and non-oil exports are about $278 per person.

Further, of the non-oil exports (i.e., the result of producing things that people in other countries want to buy), 50% is from Malaysia and Indonesia (which lie far outside the core of the Islamosphere) and another 20% is from Turkey (by tradition another peripheral nation in the Islamic world). Given that the combined population of those three countries is about 335 million, non-oil exports from those countries are about $829 per capita but non-oil exports from the rest of the majority Muslim countries are about $100 a person.

Compare that to some of the following Anglosphere areas:

Given that many immigrants from majority Muslim countries are successful entrepreneurs in the Anglosphere, it strongly appears that there are systemic reasons why they are not as productive in their home countries.


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